Risotto has a reputation it doesn’t deserve. Two things decide whether this works, and if you get both right the rest is hard to ruin.
The two levers
First: the stock goes in warm, a ladle at a time. Keep it at a bare simmer in a pan next to you. Cold stock drops the pan temperature every time you add it, the rice stalls, and by the time you’ve got through six cups you’ve cooked it for thirty-five minutes instead of twenty and the grains have gone to mush at the edges while staying chalky in the middle.
Second: brown the mushrooms separately, then fold half back in at the end. If you cook a pound of sliced mushrooms in with the onion they release their water into the pan and simmer in it. Grey, squeaky, no flavour. Given a hot wide pan and two minutes of being left completely alone, the same mushrooms go properly brown and taste like something.
I hold back about half of them off the heat and stir them through at the very end, so there’s a bit of texture left rather than everything having merged into one soft thing.
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups Arborio or Carnaroli rice
- 1 pound mushrooms (cremini, button, or a mix), sliced
- 6 cups vegetable broth, kept warm
- 1 medium onion or 2 shallots, finely diced
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 cup dry white wine (or extra broth)
- 4 cups fresh spinach, roughly chopped
- 3/4 cup grated Parmesan, plus more to serve
- 3 tablespoons butter, divided
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- Salt, black pepper, and a pinch of nutmeg
- Fresh thyme or parsley, for finishing
Instructions
- Bring the broth to a bare simmer in a saucepan and leave it there, on the burner next to your risotto pan, for the whole cook.
- In a wide heavy pan, heat the olive oil and 1 tablespoon of butter over medium-high. Add the mushrooms in one layer and don’t touch them for 2 minutes. Salt them, cook until deeply golden, about 6 to 8 minutes total, then lift out roughly half and set aside.
- Drop the heat to medium, add the onion to the mushrooms left in the pan and cook 4 minutes until translucent. Stir in the garlic for 30 seconds.
- Add the rice and stir for 1 to 2 minutes, until the outer edge of each grain turns translucent and the centre stays chalky white.
- Pour in the wine. Stir until it has almost gone, scraping the browned bits off the base.
- Add the warm broth one ladleful at a time, stirring often, waiting until each addition is nearly absorbed before the next. Expect 18 to 22 minutes.
- Start tasting at 18 minutes. It’s done when the grain is tender with a faint firmness at the core and the whole thing slumps slowly when you tilt the pan. You may not need all the broth.
- Stir in the spinach until it wilts, about 1 minute. Off the heat, add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter, the Parmesan, a pinch of nutmeg and a lot of black pepper. Beat it hard with a wooden spoon, cover, rest 2 minutes.
- Serve with the reserved mushrooms on top and a few thyme leaves or torn parsley.
If it goes stiff on the plate
It will, if you leave it standing. Risotto keeps absorbing. The fix is a splash of the leftover hot broth beaten in right before it goes to the table, which takes ten seconds and rescues it completely. Serve it looser than looks right in the pan, because it tightens on the way to the table and again on a cold plate. I warm the bowls under the hot tap and dry them.
You don’t have to stir constantly
The stirring myth costs people twenty minutes of standing at the hob. What the stirring actually does is knock starch off the outside of the grains, and you need enough agitation for that, not continuous motion. Every 20 or 30 seconds is plenty. Use the gaps to grate the Parmesan, wash the mushroom pan, or chop the spinach.
Leftovers are better than the fresh risotto in one specific way: cold, set risotto rolls into balls, gets crumbed and fried, and that is arancini. If you’d rather use the same mushrooms somewhere gentler, they go into a mushroom soup without complaint, and the ladle-by-ladle habit carries straight over to a vegetable paella, where the one difference is that you leave the paella alone entirely. For a weeknight that has no twenty free minutes in it, pesto pasta gets you to roughly the same comfort in twelve.